Is intelligence services and their oversight bodies fighting on an institutional battlefield?

Melanie Sofia Hartvigsen, Mia Hartmann and Adam Diderichsen investigates the 2020 conflict between the Danish Defence Intelligence Service and the Danish Intelligence Oversight Board by merging the literature on intelligence accountability and institutional logics.

They propose a new framework for analysing and explaining conflicts regarding democratic accountability and through a qualitative interview study, they demonstrate that the conflicts that arise between intelligence services and their overseers stem from differing interpretations of accountability, rather than being simply a question of more or less accountability.

Want to know more? This study is a chapter in the edited volume Intelligence Practices in High-Trust Societies: Scandinavian Exceptionalism? that can be pre-ordered here.